I am the thought you are now thinking.
Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.
Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.
You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated ‘you’ makes more decisions, and so forth, ’round and ’round.
This sentence contradicts itself – no actually it doesn’t.
You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people’s brains. It’s a less detailed copy, it’s coarse-grained.
Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths.
It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done...
The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.
Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.
I don’t feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.
I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.
It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic property of any formal system.
Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.
We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.
For now, what is important is not finding the answer, but looking for it.
It is curious, how one often mistrusts one’s own opinions if they are stated by someone else.
Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right. In other words, concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees.
I personally cannot imagine that consciousness will be fully understood without reference to Godelian loops or level-crossing feedback loops.
Consider the fact that you are now experiencing death, in a curious way. Not being in Paris right now, you know what it is like to be dead in Paris. No lights, no sounds – nothing. The same goes for Timbuctu. In fact, you are dead everywhere – except for one small spot. Just think how close you are to being dead everywhere!